I will use the server to post news, work in progress (some hot, never before seen stuff in there), ask for opinions and you can use it to tell me how shit the mod is, the infinite amount of problems you have and how I steal content from other mods.

It's a win win situation.

Really now, I hope it will get some love from you guys.
Thanks for playing.

Sunday, July 30, 2017

So the old Patcher server went down and I thought this was it. But I was wrong.
I have to say that, in my modding years I have met some really nice and awesome people, people who have helped me without asking for anything in return. Two such people are Expression93 and TechAUmNu, who have offered to host my mod on their awesome servers, helping me deliver content in such a way that it rivals actual corporations. Thank you deeply.

The Patcher is now back up and running but on a different server, which means that everyone needs to download a new Patcher.
All links throughout the blog which redirect to the Patcher are the same, so just go ahead and click on one of them, like THIS one.

For the people who can't get the Patcher working, for some reason or another, a new installer will eventually come but it will take some time until that happens. I have A LOT of stuff to work on before I call it a day.
So in the meantime use the manual installation links, I guess. Please contact me if the Patcher doesn't work for you, this is ridiculous, it should work for everybody.

I would also want to thank DayoftheNinja from the Wars of Liberty mod, who offered to help host the mod in case everything else fails.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Although it may look otherwise, finishing the implementation of the African continent is still my main focus, even though I've been slacking a little recently. But now that I started working on it again, I thought it was time for a progress update.

Right now the mod is a bit of a mess, Swedish are not finished (finished their names though, thanks for contributing!), all African maps are not in and there might be a few "Out of sync" problems as well. The Patcher is also in trouble. It's a lot to do and little time to do it.

But I promise you this, once I finish, everything will look neat and tidy and will play just as good.

With the intention of adding more African natives, finding good houses to use for Dahomey was hard, and the only solution I had was to use Indian houses and maybe retexture them. But it wasn't ideal, so I thought I should try something else.

After a lot of consideration, I decided to use the Age1 Egyptian houses from Age of Mythology, who would fit my needs just right (plus a sleek pyramid to serve as the KotH monument on African maps).

Working with models, however, is not my expertise. But with help from wyteraven (King's Return mod) I managed to successfully import models into AoE3.

(work in progress)

But this is not all, for a more authentic African experience, I will be adding many new animals, custom ground textures and proper treasure guardians.

Plus another African native tribe, the Zulu. Again with help from wyteraven, the Zulu will have their own new buildings, units and all that.

This will bring the number of African natives to 3, which will be joined by Sufi (in northern Africa) and Jesuits (in southern Africa; without the Asian look, of course).

There are also 4 new African maps to be released, 2 of which are done and 2 of which I still need to work on.

One of the new maps, Great Zimbabwe, will have each player start in a Star Fort!

Something like this:

Actually it's exactly this, maybe a little more compact around the towers. It might also feature a capturable fixed gun (from the campaigns) to help you lay siege to your enemy!

Another thing I want to talk about is the Immigrants technology. In its original form, the Immigrants tech makes houses useless, has no counter and makes the Sioux free pop bonus and the Spanish TC pop card pointless.
All of this, plus the fact that many players still want a bigger population limit although I explained all problems related to this, gave me an idea for a new Immigrants tech.

I want to change Immigrants so that, instead of doing what it does now, it will convert all your existing villagers into immigrants, who are the same thing but do not take up pop.
So if you have, let's say 100 villagers (which means 100 pop) and you research the tech, 100 pop suddenly becomes available for military units.
But this will only affect your current villagers, so if you lose them you will have to train normal villagers.

Friday, February 24, 2017

Alright, so, I need Swedish names for Town Centers, Forts, Ships, Explorers, Generals and Churches. I'd like mostly historically accurate names but if none can be provided then your dog's name would work just as good, if it's in Swedish of course (kidding about the dog part, btw).

I can always do all the research myself if no one wants to help but I thought this would be a nice way to let you guys get more involved with the mod, just as we did for Italians.

Now onto other updates, there's a lot coming. The reason there hasn't been an update in a while is because I started something which is... so horrible to work on... that I keep delaying it. Though in the meantime I worked on other things so I'll just release updates with that THING unfinished, for now.

The THING I'm talking about is unit descriptions. I want to go over every single unit description and make them show what type the unit is and what it counters, instead of just "Cavalry armed with cold steel"... Yes, very helpful game...

Other things I worked on include new cards for several civs, such as Sioux, Germans, Americans, Italians and Swedish (yes, it's finally happening), new African maps (we still have 4 to go and 2 will be released soon) and new African animals, such as Gazelles, Cranes and Asses (Donkeys) (courtesy of WoL).

And other **** I probably forgot about.
So yeah, stay tuned, awesome stuff is coming and the game will only get better!

Friday, November 11, 2016

Update: After learning how to improve map visuals I went through some of the maps from the African update (around half of them) and improved their textures and props. I also added Nomad support for the new maps that didn't have it. New Asian maps have also been added and more African maps are on the way.

Note: Forgot to mention, if you get "Out of sync" in multiplayer, go to where you have the game installed, delete the RMM folder and run the Patcher, then try again.

The long awaited (took more than I thought) big awesome update with new maps from Africa and Oceania is here!

A total of 19 new maps, plus fixes, changes and additions to existing maps are part of this update. Including new animals and natives for the new maps.
One of the fixes adresses the bug which caused starting units (such as explorers) to not spawn at the beginning of a game. This bug should no longer occur on any of the "official" maps.

Before we go any further, I want to make it clear that none of these maps were made by me from scratch, they are made by the community map creators Garja, Neuron, R.F. Gandalf and Durokan.
All maps are, however, modified by me to fit the African and Oceania themes.
Proper credit has been given for each map creator ingame during the map loading screen.

I also have to mention that the new loading screen images for the new maps are taken from the Wars of Liberty mod, although they are also modified by me to fit the project.

Now, let's go through each of the new and old maps from this update:

As mentioned above, all maps received the "starting units do not spawn" fix and Control Flags have been removed from all maps. The only Control Flags still present are the ones each player starts with and the ones from Trading Posts.

Water Maps: a new map option which randomly chooses between all water maps; water maps are maps with a water homecity flag, and are basically all maps not present in the Land Maps option.

Sahara / Large Sahara: a large, arid desert where all resources are concentrated around oases.Congo / Large Congo: a dense jungle where the numerous trees are both a blessing and a curse.Nile River: a river splitting into the resource rich Nile Delta.Savanna: the iconic African Savanna, a grassland filled with exotic wildlife.Madagascar / Regicide Madagascar: a huge, isolated island in the middle of the ocean.Kilimanjaro: the peak of a dormant volcano.Unknown - Inland: replaces the old Unknown map which was extremely bugged; the new map randomizes between properly made terrains with some African flavor.Unknown - Coastal: same as above, only that it randomizes water maps.

Australia / Large Australia / Regicide Australia: the gold rich Australian Outback.Indonesia: a large archipelago with diverse wildlife.New Zealand: the last major landmasses settled by humans.

Besides these map changes, the new African animals are the Zebra and Dromedary and the new natives are the Saltpeter and Dahomey.
Also, added proper Mongolian voices for the Mangudai and Mongol Scout and Korean voices for the Wukou Pirate and Wukou Jong/Junk.
New voices have also been added for the new Sufi native warrior, the Bishari Archer; instead of making a new elephant unit for Saltpeter which proved difficult, I instead moved the War Elephant to Saltpeter and added a new camel archer for Sufi.

And this should be about it. As always, if you find any kind of bugs make sure you let me know so I can fix them as soon as possible.